


Peculiar Contentedness

by MirandaTam



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-24
Updated: 2012-08-24
Packaged: 2017-11-12 18:34:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/494358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MirandaTam/pseuds/MirandaTam





	Peculiar Contentedness

There’s a certain time of day when the air gains a peculiar quality.  
It’s not always the same time of day, and it doesn’t happen every day, but it happens. It’s when you start to notice the light, and hear all of the sounds. Everything seems calmer. It’s not like everything is moving slower – most of the time things seem to proceed at a normal pace – but there’s just a more peaceful quality to it. Everybody and everything seems nicer, somehow, and it’s like there’s nothing wrong with the world.  
Sometimes it happens in the very early morning, when the sky is still grey with the morning’s first yawn and the shadows haven’t quite formed yet. There’s a chill in the air, but not enough that you need to put on a jacket or a sweater. The birds have already warmed up and are getting into the third stanza of the overture of the day, but other than that there’s no noise.  
Sometimes it happens on those lazy summer afternoons – the ones so hot that the air conditioning has broken down and you have nothing to do other than go out to the front porch to leave. At those times, it’s so hot out that even the bees and wasps are moving slower, and you can do anything that you want – except that you don’t want to do anything. You sit down, or lie down, and you open a book or you don’t, but at those times everything is half asleep anyway. All of the shadows have lost their defining edges, and the heat-haze across the black asphalt of the street is so strong that you can barely see your neighbor’s yard. Even the never-ceasing drone of cars on far more busy streets has slowed to a drizzle of slow honey, and the air gains that same sweet yellow property.  
Sometimes it’s just in stolen moments in the sky – a beautiful cloud that you have to stop and look at, the light of a rising full moon like milk on your skin, macroscopic drops of rain almost managing to reach your hiding place in a doorway. Perfect moments, stolen out of time.  
But most of the time it’s in the late afternoon, closer to dusk than not. The shadows reach towards the slow-approaching night, elongating beyond imaginable proportions. The light turns golden-brown, its taste on the back of your tongue the same as a perfectly-roasted marshmallow, though without the same sticky quality. The air is of a perfect temperature – if not that exact place between warm and cold, it is softly warm – the temperature of a hug, or of blankets wrapped around you as you slowly fall asleep. The sky is still light enough to see, but not light enough to hurt your eyes if you happen to glance up.  
These are the perfect times, the moments that we forget, the spaces that we lose to fading memory and the twisted road of experiences. These are the moments in which we are not sad, nor happy, nor angry, but something that is better than anything else.  
These are the times that we are content.


End file.
